To keep things interesting and to help out the visual learners out there, I'll organize my posts around the pictures I have. I accumulated a nice little collection of bicycle pictures while in Amsterdam, so let's start with that.
The Dutch love their bicycles. According to Wikipedia (but without a source cited, so it could be a lie), there are around 700,000 of them in Amsterdam. The city government encourages the bike culture by creating bike paths everywhere and charging high prices for parking cars. There is also a gigantic bike parking garage next to the central train station, so that people can take the train into the city, pick up their wheels, and ride to work.
Perhaps to make picking their own bikes out of a crowd a little easier, people do a lot of customizing. Sometimes it's practical: big wooden wagons attached to the front or back for hauling around groceries, dogs, and miscellany; up to three child seats for picking up the kiddies from Sue's house; little baskets for transporting tulips; and of course a bell or horn for frightening the tourists. Other times, though, it's just pretty: artificial flowers woven through the frame, hand-painted designs or just a good coat of spray paint, and streamers, beads, or other girly embellishments.
Amsterdam has more than 1200 bridges over its oodles of little and big canals, and they are prime bike-parking spots. I'm not sure I can think of anything more charming than this.
As if they weren't already environmentally friendly enough, people in Amsterdam also find uses for dilapidated old bikes past their cycling life. Often times they hold signs for little boutiques, markets, and galleries.
My favorite reincarnated bike, though, was a planter outside someone's house. Note the litterbox full of daffodils: the "Kitty WC."
All of this leads quite nicely into my next post, which I'll try to write from Paris tomorrow: Amsterdam, Part II: Flowers, Art, and Other Pretty Things.
(For more bike pictures, check out my album.)
2 comments:
I have to tell you about the funny thing my Delft tulip vase with the pretty design on it did (and thank you for the lovely birthday gift). As you might remember, it has seven holes: one on top and six around the perimeter. When I first opened it, I thought: That looks like a hookah without the stoppers and tubes. Or perhaps a Sputnik. But it has a pretty design on it. It's hard to imagine it with tulips in, but we shall see!
So ... Saturday I went to market and got some cut tulips (Easter was too early this year for tulips in the Lebanon Valley; a few adventurous croci was (were?) all we had, and they looked a bit apprehensive and forlorn about it all. Anyways, I brought the tulips home, and I poked them into the vase. The one on top looked nice, but the ones on the perimeter just sort of stuck straight out akimbo like the unfortunate result of a three-couple figure-skating mishap.
Hmm, I thought. Something is escaping me. I'll put it in the dining room and I won't look at it anymore right now, and perhaps tomorrow I will be more appreciative of the Dutch aesthete.
Well! I got up Sunday morning, and after saying Happy Easter to the sleeping forms of Trolly and the elderborn, I wandered downstairs to make coffee and see if the Easter Bunny had come. I happened to glance into the dining room and to my great surprise Lo! They had risen! The six radial tulips had bent themselves skyward and the ugly-duckling arrangement had remade itself into a thing of remarkable grace and beauty. (Picture our dining room chandelier.)
I thought it was an Easter miracle but subsequent Google research revealed that cut tulips uniquely do indeed continue to grow after they are placed in the vase and my Easter miracle could be explained by geotropism.
Well you know my take on these things (think: creationism, evolution and intelligent design), so as you would imagine there was nothing to reconcile as it all made sense to me. It was an Easter gift, the fact that it was just biological mechanisms doing what they are supposed to do notwithstanding.
Happy Easter!
--Papa
i might be in love with the pink bicycle photo, and the flower pot bicycle photo as well...
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